


The One Who Dressed Your Wounds At Night

by ABookAndACoffee



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-12
Updated: 2017-05-12
Packaged: 2018-10-30 21:10:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10885002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABookAndACoffee/pseuds/ABookAndACoffee
Summary: Azriel and Morrigan meet in the Illyrian camp and each experience a different type of darkness that they come to recognize in each other.TW self harm"The first time it happened, Azriel was afraid.There was something perverse in mirroring the actions of those who had hurt him, and the shame washed over him even as the breath left his lungs in release, as he felt the lifting of a burden and the sharp focus on the surface of his skin, a sharpness so bright he couldn’t see or feel anything else.The next time, he looked forward to it."





	The One Who Dressed Your Wounds At Night

The first time it happened, Azriel was afraid. 

There was something perverse in mirroring the actions of those who had hurt him, and the shame washed over him even as the breath left his lungs in release, as he felt the lifting of a burden and the sharp focus on the surface of his skin, a sharpness so bright he couldn’t see or feel anything else. 

The next time, he looked forward to it. 

He developed a routine and it was easy to explain the marks away as the result of training, practicing for a battle that was surely not too far away. Sometimes he would push himself until he thought that maybe what he needed was not to see how far he could bend, but how much it would take for him to break. He allowed new wounds to be created in training and then tended to them in the dark, opening them again and again. He found himself reaching for them, reminding himself that he could, indeed, be in control of this. In this small way, he was the master of what he felt. 

They couldn’t fester, not if he wanted to continue training, so he cared for them, the large wounds and the small. He became an expert at nursing himself, doing just enough to allow them to heal. There was another comforting balance in caring for himself just enough so that he could do with himself what he would. 

His new acquaintances, he learned, would pay attention to him. Rhysand and Cassian noticed him, and their teasing was not an attempt to hurt him, but to learn about him. There was no hiding his hands, what others had done to him, but he knew by instinct that they would not understand this, and so the excuses multiplied. 

The first time he saw Mor, he tugged on his sleeves in a panic, his shadows wrapping around him. Surely she was flawless; there could be nothing hidden underneath her blonde waves and broad smile that could possibly be related to what he had known and inflicted upon himself. Keeping this from her sight was the least he could do. 

He doubted she was even aware of what pain was. Her calm, measured stares at Rhys and her glances at him convinced him that she had no need to hide. She had a laugh that echoed through the camp, her head falling forwards, her hair covering her face, her hands on her stomach. He didn’t know why she was here, but he watched her frankness and joy from his corners, wondering what it would be like to be untouched. 

Then Cassian took her to bed. 

And then her family, in what he had come to believe was standard practice, took their anger out on her flesh. 

Finding her in that place, nearly gone, with the wound not of her own making, but of theirs - he wretched, emptied himself of everything he thought he had. He wanted to rage and howl and beat the earth with his fists, but instead he wrapped her in what he had to spare, picked her up, and began tending to her wounds instead of his own. 

He watched them heal. The light was gone from her eyes and she refused to look at him for weeks. She barely spoke, just watched his hands as they tended her. The hands that his brothers had molded in their disdain and cruelty had done their work to continue inflicting pain on him, but now, he thought, perhaps they might be put to better use. His habit of healing himself, taking care of those cuts, was put to the test with this gaping hole in her belly. He had never worked on himself with full healing in mind, and so for her, he changed. For her, he learned what he needed to do to ensure that it closed, that it scarred, that as little hint could be left as possible. 

This was not something he wanted reopened. He did not want to watch her pick away at this, pull herself apart from the inside. 

He had lost track of his own routine, consumed as he was by his focus on her healing rather than his own slow, methodical self-destruction. A restlessness had begun to grow under his skin, the scars on his skin attaining a new hue they had never had the time to find before. He realized that his old excuses would not work here, but it was calling to him - this need for control, to place all the rage in his heart calmly on the outside. 

During those weeks of isolation and healing, she let her gaze gradually travel, at first looking far away, at nothing, until she focused on his hands, then his arms, until he found her watching his face each time he came to visit her. He rested on his knees by her bed, wings dragging on the ground, shadows remaining at his back, and waited for her to speak. He wondered how long it would be until he could hear that full, ringing laugh again. 

The last day, her eyes made their familiar trajectory, watching his hands from where they worked to change her bandages, then watching his arms, his shoulders, until she watched his face. Her eyes always paused on his scars, those from training and those that he passed off as having the same source. He avoided looking at her, always, but he was familiar with this pattern despite that. 

The last day, she grabbed his arm, placed a fingertip on a wound that he had created himself, and asked him why. 

“To feel.” 

She nodded and released him. Folding her hands over her stomach, her gaze again turned inward. 

He didn’t ask how she knew. He catalogued her scars, knew that this was never a choice she would make herself. But somehow she had found them, the parts of himself that he longed to hurt, longed to heal, the parts of him that he would rather never existed. Picking away at them meant that he could watch them heal. But watching her these weeks, her refusal to give in to what they would have her become, he wondered if there were not other ways of being. 

When he watched her leave, he made a decision to discover how she had been able to find him out, realizing her smiles hid something as surely as his silence. These other ways of being, he realized, may cost him, but perhaps he would be willing to pay that price.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song Day Is Coming by Katie Kim, my all-purpose angsty fave. 
> 
> Comments appreciated, find me on [tumblr](http://abookandacoffee.tumblr.com/).


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